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Get startedYou’ve done everything you can to make your customers happy. Your customer service team has been answering calls day in and day out, helping each customer in the best way they know how. But are your customer service strategies working? One key way to find out is to listen to customer feedback.
Doing so will help your company focus on the end customer, drive customer satisfaction and customer success, and build a loyal customer base. Keep reading to learn more about why customer feedback matters and how it can improve your customer experience.
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Why Does Customer Feedback Matter?
Your business relies on a loyal customer base. Therefore, you need to develop a good rapport with your customers—being updated with what they like and dislike about your offerings. The stronger the bond between you and your customers, the better grasp you have of how the world sees your business.
The Key Reasons Customer Feedback Matters
Collecting customer feedback shows customers that you’re listening.
Listening to your customers makes them feel valued, which grows retention and loyalty.
Feedback helps you build a better customer experience.
Customer feedback helps other customers with their purchase decisions.
Apart from the customers themselves, customer feedback also helps with your business objectives.
Listening to what the customers like and dislike develops insight-driven product innovations.
Customer feedback helps you make well-informed business decisions.
Negative feedback gives you an opportunity to prove you’re listening and build your brand reputation.
The benefits of customer feedback come from both positive and negative feedback, so let’s take a look at how to collect it.
Collecting Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback Surveys
The purpose of customer feedback surveys is to assess the satisfaction of your customers toward different aspects of your product, service, or company. They are primarily used to derive insights that help you make well-informed decisions and innovations.
Customer feedback surveys come in various shapes and sizes. They typically have around five to 10 questions about your product or service, the customer’s experience, and their overall satisfaction with your offering. While these surveys can be in the form of written questionnaires, in-person interviews, or phone calls, they are now more commonly done over the internet or other digital means. Once you’ve gathered the data, you can use certain tools to help with customer feedback analysis.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer experience metric that uses a CES survey to measure how easy it was for the customer to interact with your business. The result is often tracked over an extended period of time to see if your company is improving in customer effort.
Customers want their problems solved quickly and conveniently. CES helps you measure, track, and reduce customer effort or friction.
You calculate CES by taking the total number of “agree”/“very easy” responses divided by the total number of responses and multiply by 100.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a key performance indicator (KPI) used to measure customer satisfaction. More often than not, CSAT is measured by a question like this one: Overall, how satisfied are you with Aircall? From there, respondents choose between “extremely dissatisfied”, “somewhat dissatisfied”, “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied”, “somewhat satisfied”, and “extremely satisfied”.
The results of this question are then averaged out for a Composite Customer Satisfaction Score, often in the form of a percentage. The higher the percentage is, the higher the total customer satisfaction—which directly impacts customer retention.
You can calculate CSAT with this formula, where “satisfied customers” refer to those who answered with “somewhat satisfied” and “extremely satisfied”:
Customers have needs and pain points that your products and services should resolve. By measuring and tracking your CSAT score, your business can monitor customer satisfaction over time.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction—a great indication of a healthy brand-customer relationship. It’s usually calculated by asking “on a scale from zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend?”
You can predict business growth with NPS. The higher the score, the more your customers will act as your brand ambassadors to their circles of influence—generating a positive sales cycle.
The measure is calculated as such, where promoters are respondents who answered 9 or 10 and detractors are those who answered with six and below:
Your goal is to have more promoters than detractors. In other words, to have a positive Net Promoter Score. No company has ever earned a perfect score of 100, as that would mean that every respondent would recommend the product or service to someone else.
As a business metric, NPS shows you the percentage of enthusiastic customers you have who are likely to generate word-of-mouth marketing.
Creating a System for Good Customer Feedback
It’s simply impossible to gather customer feedback survey responses manually—let alone analyzing and checking the trends of hundreds of customer responses. Instead, you need to create a customer feedback system to gather, monitor, and organize all the data.
Creating a good customer feedback system includes two parts: mapping the customer journey and applying different methods to collect customer feedback forms. Let’s take a look at how they work.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer feedback improves business performance by diagnosing problems in the customer experience. Included in this experience are multiple touchpoints where the customers interact with your business. When put all together, those points make up a customer journey map—where your customer feedback surveys need to closely follow.
Customer feedback surveys need to be built into the customer experience for the best response rates and accurate customer feedback data.
Your goal is to develop the same kind of customer journey map for your specific persona and customer experience. While you create the map, identify the major touchpoints and their corresponding customer emotions—where your customer feedback surveys will focus on.
In other customer journey maps, you’ll also need to include the “usage” touchpoint, depending on your type of product or service. Remember: The goal of customer feedback surveys is to understand how your organization performed at each point of the customer journey while it’s still fresh.
Collecting Customer Feedback
One of the most popular customer feedback tools for data collection is the ACAF Customer Feedback Loop. It applies to each customer that submits feedback—most especially the ones that are complaints.
If handling all the data sounds time-consuming, you can use cloud-based call center software to help your agents categorize, follow up, and easily act on customer feedback. Using software will save time, keep your agents fully informed, achieve first-call resolutions with the customers, and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Channels you can use to collect customer feedback forms:
Phone calls
Online polls
In-app forms
Email surveys
Live chat support
Online communities
In-app reactions (on social media)
Post-evaluation feedback forms
You can and should use more than one of these communication channels, as customers nowadays are looking for an omnichannel customer service solution that allows them to contact your team on the platform of their choice. An omnichannel experience—plus a cloud-based call center—will help your team collect and act on feedback.
The Best Questions to Ask to Gather Actionable Customer Feedback
Now that you have an idea of what your customer feedback survey will look like, here are the best questions you can include in the list to gather actionable customer feedback information. Choose the set of questions that best aligns with your business objectives:
For Better Customer Service
How were you greeted by our customer service representatives?
Did our team resolve your issue immediately?
How can we improve our service for you?
For Assessing Customer Satisfaction
How has our product or service stopped helping you achieve your goals?
Have you decided to try another competitor?
How could we have changed our product or service for you?
For Product or Service Improvement
What are your favorite and least favorite features of our product or service?
What problems have you encountered while using our product or service?
If you could change or add anything to our product or service, what would it be?
For Understanding Customer Needs
What problems or challenges does our product or service solve for you?
What prompted you to find a solution?
How long did it take before our product or service showed satisfying results?
How else can we make our product or service more effective for you?
For Understanding the Purchasing Experience
Would you describe the purchase process as easy or difficult?
What can we do to improve the check-out process?
Did you have to wait a long time?
As you formulate your questions, you also need to have an appropriate format for receiving customer input. Here are ways to format their answers:
Open-ended questions
Option questions
Yes or no questions
Sliding-scale questions
Listen to Your Customers—They Drive Your Business
In a nutshell, it’s important to listen to your customers because their feedback allows you to improve customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty. Ultimately, customer feedback drives bottom-line profits and boosts your brand reputation—one valuable insight at a time.
The Aircall team has designed a cloud-based call center software that enables seamless communication across your organization. From internal communication to delivering excellent customer service, Aircall uses business process automation to serve both internal and external stakeholders.
Our software turns your customer experience into a competitive advantage. It provides cloud call center IVR menus, skill-based routing, live call monitoring, and more. Aircall also connects to your Helpdesk or CRM to have your team solely focusing on satisfying your customers:
Aircall enables you to listen to your customers and effectively address their concerns—turning your company into an insight-driven, customer-centric business that’s fully equipped to grow alongside the increasing demand of your customers.
Published on September 22, 2021.
